Conventionally, clothes closets are provided with one or more longitudinal rods secured at opposite ends thereof to the closet walls for suspending therefrom conventional hangers which support all types of wearing apparel, such as jackets, blouses, pants, skirts, etc. Such an arrangement fails to make efficient use of limited closet space and is often cumbersome to use. More specifically, the suspended clothes tend to be crowded in and tight, one against the other, making it usually inconvenient and difficult either to remove or insert an article of clothing, requiring the user to spread apart the hangers to the left from those to the right of the desired hanger in order to create sufficient room therebetween for the removal or insertion of the hanger in question or the clothes supported thereby. In addition to the inconvenience and difficulty involved, it also has the effect of overcrowding the suspended garments which then become wrinkled.
In order to avoid the above described disadvantages, there have been developed and used improved hanger mechanisms wherein the hanger proper is fixedly secured at one end of a laterally extending rod, the other end of which is provided with a downwardly extending portion adapted to fit in an aperture whereby it is pivotable within such aperture. This arrangement permits the hanger proper to swing about its pivot which is horizontally spaced therefrom. Such arrangement makes far more efficient use of closet space since adjacent pivot apertures can be closely spaced while still not crowding the garments supported by the hangers proper which are laterally spaced from their pivot apertures and which can be easily swung in either direction (as pages of a book are turned) to make any particular hanger easily accessible to either place a garment thereon or remove one therefrom, thus eliminating the problem of removing a particular garment which is crowded between adjacent garments. An example of such improved swingable hanger construction wherein the hanger proper is fixedly secured to one end of a laterally extending rod whose other end is pivotally mounted to a wall mount in the closet is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,118,544 and British Patent Specification No. 174,283.
Such swingable hanger construction, though constituting a vast improvement over the conventional hanger supporting rod arrangement in that it makes far better utilization of limited closet space and makes removal and suspension of garments far easier, still presents a number of problems due particularly to the fact that the hanger portion of the assembly is permanently affixed to the laterally extending rod. In view of this, it is impossible, for example, when clothes come back from the cleaners on a hanger, to suspend such hanger directly onto the hanger assembly. Instead the article of clothing must be removed from the hanger provided by the cleaning establishment and must then be rehung onto the hanger proper of the assembly. This is an additional inconvenience especially where the hanger assembly is suspended at an elevated location not easily accessible by the user. Furthermore, the known swingable hanger arrangements make it impossible to use preferred hangers, either for aesthetic or functional reasons. Further still, if for any reason the hanger proper breaks off its assembly, the entire assembly must be replaced.
It is a main object of the invention to provide a swingable hanger assembly which retains all the above pointed out advantages thereof without, however, having the accompanying disadvantages referred to above.